Purple harvest yields perfumed farmers

Most farmers finish a day's work smelling a bit oily, dusty, and sweaty, but over on the Eyre Peninsula a harvest has just finished that leaves the workers smelling more like "grandma's undies drawer".

"We're off to cut some lavender," explains Fred Gerswich over the roar of the old ute engine, "this is one of two patches of lavender, the other patch has been harvested and we're working on this one now."

The retired farmer has been helping with the annual lavender harvest at Port Lincoln's Dellacolline Winery this year, where lavender plots have been growing since 2006.

He drives past the rows of grapevines, quietly developing their fruits, down to the bottom of the property where there's a bright purple expanse of lavender.

Back-dropped by Boston Bay glistening in the morning light, the lavender harvest starts early before the sun gets too hot and bees start buzzing.

Former police sergeant, Mick Miller, has also turned 'amateur lavender cutter' this harvest and jumps out the back of the ute from beside the harvesting contraption.

"It's a cutter and a blower- it's got a cutter on the bottom, blower on the top and as it cuts it, it blows it into the bag behind.

"This thing's made in Japan, can't understand any of the writing on it," jokes Mick.

This machine is in fact a Japanese tea harvester.

Sitting between two wing-like handles used to carry it through the crop is what Fred describes as a small, metre-wide header front.

It slices the heads off the lavender, and blows them back into a long silver bag which glides behind.

"It's an aluminium construction the machine, so it's not very heavy," says Fred.

"The engine, even though it does a good job, is fairly light too so it's not all that dramatic to have to pull it along by hand."

Planted for prettiness, at first

Ian Fletcher owns the vineyard and seven years ago he decided to plant two acres of lavender there.

It was mostly for aesthetic reasons at the time, a way to fill surplus areas on the property that weren't suitable for growing grapes.

"We wanted to make it a bit more attractive than just have it basically unruly grass, so what we've done is we looked at a plant which we could use which complements our industry and lavender was ideal," Ian says.

"It doesn't require a lot of water and it likes poor quality alkaline soils- which we've got plenty of here."

Now the lavender interest has expanded, and the two crops are harvested annually then dried or distilled for the oil.

Harvesting occurs during January once the flowers have bloomed, and Ian says it's much easier using the tea harvester than cutting the heads off by hand.

"I'd spoken to a couple of guys down in the Barossa Valley and Naracoorte, they started at 6am in the morning with specialised secateurs and elbow grease.

"I didn't think that was a totally realistic process, but this farm in NSW had imported this harvester for their own use and recommended it because they said it just made the harvest process so much easier."

After the Japanese wife of a local fishermen had interpreted the foreign instructions, Ian says the harvester effectively enabled them to get 90 to 95% of heads off in one pass.

Unlocking the floral oil

Collecting big bags of lavender heads enables the flower to be distilled, and its rich scented oil extracted.

On Ian's property they use a steam distillation process, involving a big steel tank heated by gas burners to unlock the little packets of lavender oil out of the heads.

"It goes through a cooling coil, and the condensate that comes out is a fair amount of water, but the lavender oil itself is obviously light and its splits and sits on the top, you just separate that and collect the oil," Ian explains.

While most farm sheds whiff of dirt and chemicals, lavender distilling creates arguably the sweetest scent ever inhaled within four corrugated iron walls.

"You know when we're harvesting lavender up here because if the wind's in your direction you're going to wear it for a while," Ian says.

"There's supposed to be some anti-bug properties to this and so certainly no self respecting fly is going to come into our shed at the moment because they'd just get overwhelmed by the lavender."

The man doing the distilling is David Jones, another retired farmer who has been helping with the lavender harvest from the very beginning.

Turning 91 this June, he's a long term fixture of the property, and says helping out with the vineyard and lavender crop helps him think he's still farming.

Moving slowly but purposefully, he waits for the distilling tank to release a bucket-worth of liquid, then heads over to the nearby table to siphon out the layer of lavender water, then add the remains to the row of glass jars filled with oil.

"It's a cushy job, you can sit down and wait, we get a jar every seven minutes, so it's fairly continuous."

But he admits the distilling job does have its challenges.

"Don't go to sleep, otherwise the bucket overflows and you lose all the oil," advises David.

"Once I went away and forgot about it, and when I came back the bucket was overflowing because all the oil was going out the top...but I won't tell the boss that."

Luckily, experiencing the all-pervasive scent of lavender for several weeks hasn't turned him off its strong floral hues.

"Yes I smell it for about three days after we've finished with this distilling.

"It's a pleasant smell, every time I use the phone it smells of lavender, quite a strong smell," David says, proving it by pulling a very perfumed mobile out his pocket.

But out in the lavender crop, Mick has a different description of how he'll smell after the morning harvesting- "like grandma's undies drawer", he chuckles.